The Detention Center
Wright County Jail
- Operated byWright County Sheriff's Office
- Jail mailing addressWright County Jail, Post Office Box 348, Clarion, Iowa 50525
- Jail phone(515) 602-6152
- Beds / rated capacityNot found - no bed count or population figure is published anywhere on the county's own site
- VisitingTuesday 1:30-5:00 p.m. and 7:00-9:00 p.m.; Thursday 1:30-5:00 p.m.; Saturday 1:30-5:00 p.m.; Sunday 1:30-5:00 p.m. and 7:00-9:00 p.m. Visitors enter by the West Entrance and must present 'A valid Driver's License or ID card that has been issued by a State, Federal or Local Government Agency.'
- Inmate telephone'Inmates are not allowed incoming calls. Outgoing calls from inmates are allowed on a daily basis through our inmate phone system.' The page refers inquiries to www.reliancetelephone.com. No per-minute or per-call rate is published.
- Inmate mailAddressed to the inmate at Wright County Jail, Post Office Box 348, Clarion, Iowa 50525. The jail prohibits 'packages, obscene or pornographic materials, food, or periodicals not sent directly from the publisher.'
- Other services at the jailFingerprinting on a 24-hour basis at no cost, and sheriff probation services, both arranged by calling (515) 602-6152
- Current inmatesNo online roster. The county's Inmates page carries one instruction: 'Please call the jail with questions or to inquire about current inmates.'
- Bond / bailNot found - neither the jail page nor the Inmates page gives any guidance on how to post bond. The sheriff's civil-process fee schedule covers service of process only (Original Notice $30.00, Subpoena $35.00, Warrants $35.00, Sheriff's Sales $75.00, Weapon Permits $50.00, mileage $0.70/mile per attempt) and says nothing about bond, bail or jail fees.
- Holds for other agenciesNot found - no contract, agreement or per-diem boarding rate is published on the county's site
- What was triedOpened: sheriff index, Jail Information & Services, Inmates, Contact Us, Civil Process, Resources and Links, Board of Supervisors index, Supervisors, Agenda and Meeting Minutes, Auditor Budget Central, county phone numbers. https://www.wrightcounty.iowa.gov/departments/sheriff/jail_services.php returned 404. https://www.wrightcounty.iowa.gov/departments/auditor/budget_reports.php, .../board_of_supervisors/board_of_supervisors_duties.php and the site news list could not be opened from here.
Source: Wright County Sheriff - Jail Information & Services · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
1/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✗Beds and daily population — not published
- ✗What it costs taxpayers — not published
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✗PREA audits — not published
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
- ✗How to post bond — not published
- ✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Jason Schluttenhofer
- Runs the jailYes - Iowa Code 356.2 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the prisoners in the county jail; repeated at Iowa Code 331.653(35)
- How the office is filledElected county-wide to a four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651); the county's own sheriff page states 'The Sheriff is an elected Wright County official who serves a four-year term'; on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office
- Chief DeputyJeremy Hogrefe
- Other sworn staff namedLieutenant Anthony Pieczko; deputies Samuel Cain, Aaron Carda, Jeremy Dodge (K-9), Barry Huedepohl, Adam Nerlien, Darren Robinson, Ray Zeien; Office Manager Brenda Majerus
- Office address719 Second Street SW, Post Office Box 348, Clarion, Iowa 50525
- Office phone(515) 532-3722; jail (515) 602-6152 (the county phone directory also lists the jail as (515) 602-6154)
Still needed
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Wright County Sheriff - Contact Us · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
Iowa district judges are merit-selected: a district judicial nominating commission (Iowa Code ch. 46 - five electors appointed by the governor, five elected by the resident bar, chaired by the judge of longest service) sends the governor two nominees, the governor appoints one, and the judge then faces a yes/no retention election and six-year terms. Iowa has 14 judicial election districts for nominating purposes and no contested judicial elections. Bail at first appearance is set by a magistrate under Iowa Code 804.22, which requires an arrested person to be taken 'without unnecessary delay...before the nearest or most accessible magistrate,' who 'shall fix the amount of bail or other conditions of release.' Iowa magistrates are appointed, not elected - Iowa Code 602.6501 puts a magistrate appointing commission in each county (one district judge, three members appointed by the county board of supervisors, and two attorneys elected by the county's attorneys), and Iowa Code 602.6403 has that commission appoint the county's magistrates to four-year terms. The three supervisor appointees are the only voter-accountable link in how the bail-setting officer got the job. No Wright County magistrate or district judge is named on any county page opened here, so none is named. Judges are state judicial officers, not county officials.
Magistrate - sets bail at first appearance (Iowa Code 804.22)
- Not found
Iowa District Court - district judges
- Not found
Still needed
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-18
The County Commissioners
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
- The boardBoard of County Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Wright County operates its own jail. The county names it - 'Wright County Jail' - on its Jail Information & Services page, which is the one transparency check this county passes.
- Domain note: the older county domain wrightcounty.org now issues a 302 redirect to www.wrightcounty.iowa.gov, which is the county's current official site and the domain every finding here comes from.
- Inspections - the key Iowa finding. Wright County does not publish its IDOC jail inspection report, and no county page opened here mentions a jail inspection at all. The inspection itself does happen: Iowa Code 356.43 requires the Iowa Department of Corrections and its inspectors to make periodic inspections of every jail, and Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to 'visit and inspect each jail within this state at least annually,' with rule 201-50.2(3) allowing those visits to be unannounced and requiring jail staff to produce 'all books, records, medical records, data, documents and accounts.' The standards are mandatory under Iowa Code 356.36. But Iowa Code 356.43(4) routes the resulting report to only four places - the IDOC director, the sheriff, the local governing body and the county attorney - and nothing requires anyone to post it. doc.iowa.gov has no jail-inspections section, so there is no state page to fall back on. The report therefore exists for Wright County and is held by the sheriff, the Board of Supervisors and the county attorney, but the public cannot see it. state_inspection is recorded as empty for that reason, not because no inspection occurs.
- Hunted for the inspection report on the sheriff's pages, the Jail Information & Services page, the Board of Supervisors agenda-and-minutes archive (which runs back to 2023) and the Auditor's budget pages. No jail committee, justice coordinating commission or criminal justice coordinating council page exists on this county's site.
- Roster: the county publishes no online inmate list. Its Inmates page consists of a single line - 'Please call the jail with questions or to inquire about current inmates' - and a phone number, (515) 602-6152. Commercial inmate-lookup sites were disregarded and are not sources.
- Bond: no guidance on how to post bail is published on any county page opened here. The only fee schedule on the sheriff's site is for civil process service, not for detention.
- Fees: the jail page states that inmates make outgoing calls 'through our inmate phone system' and refers inquiries to a vendor site, but publishes no per-minute rate, no video-visit rate and no commissary price list. Visitation is in person on a posted schedule.
- Capacity and population: no bed count, rated capacity or daily population figure appears anywhere on the county's site. Iowa Code 356.49 requires every sheriff to file a monthly written report with the IDOC director giving the number of men, women and juveniles held, so the data exists inside IDOC, but no evidence was found that IDOC publishes it and there is no state jail-population page.
- Budget: the Auditor maintains a 'Budget Central' page (https://www.wrightcounty.iowa.gov/departments/auditor/budget_central.php), but it carries no budget documents itself and no sheriff, jail or public-safety line item. The Budget Reports page it points to could not be opened from here, so no corrections or detention budget figure is recorded and the check is 'no'. County jails in Iowa run on county property and local taxes; federal money enters only through per-diem boarding, SCAAP and grants.
- Deaths in custody: Iowa publishes no statewide dataset. Iowa Admin. Code 201-50.22(14) requires the state jail inspection unit of the Department of Corrections to be notified within 24 hours of any death, attempted suicide, fire, escape, injury to staff or prisoners from assaults, or use of force and prisoner self-injuries, and Iowa Code 127.3(1) requires an autopsy for a death in a jail or under police custody where there is not a natural disease process that accounts for the death. Neither duty produces a public number. Wright County publishes no death in its own custody, so the check is 'no'.
- PREA: no PREA audit report or certification is published on the county's site.
- Open records: Iowa Code chapter 22. The right is at 22.2 - 'Every person shall have the right to examine and copy a public record.' There is no blanket response deadline; the only clock is 22.8(4), which caps delay taken to screen a record for confidentiality at twenty calendar days and says it 'ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.' A chapter 22 request to the sheriff, the Board of Supervisors or the county attorney is the route to the inspection report, the jail's rated capacity and the corrections budget, all of which exist and none of which this county posts.
- Search budget: 3 WebSearch calls used, as allowed. Everything above comes from pages opened on www.wrightcounty.iowa.gov.
- Board of Supervisors (Iowa counties are governed by a board of supervisors, not commissioners). Five members, elected by district. The county's own Supervisors page lists Rick Rasmussen (District 1, Chairman Pro Tem), Ashley Bosch (District 2, Chairman), Dean Kluss (District 3), Lynn Loux (District 4) and Betty Ellis (District 5). The board is a statutory recipient of the county's annual IDOC jail inspection report under Iowa Code 356.43(4); the county posts agendas, minutes and meeting videos back to 2023, but no jail inspection report was found among the material reachable from that page. No dedicated jail tax or detention levy was found.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Wright County and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for it.
Names verified 2026-09-18 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered